Answering questions is a form of impromptu, extemporaneous, or “off the cuff” speaking that is an important skill. Every meeting of Toastmasters International has a portion devoted to Table Topics. I find Table Topics much more difficult than doing a prepared speech. The one to two minute period for answering the question feels like forever to me! Here are some articles about tactics and strategies.

An impromptu speech is like a jazz solo it takes thought and lots of practice to do it well.

12. Flip to the next chart before your audience can read to the bottom of the current one.

13. As you point to your chart, be sure to turn away from the audience. Mumble so softly that even the front row can’t hear you.

Of course, the thirteen points listed above are purely tongue-in-cheek. Flip charts are excellent visual aids for presentations. There is no projector bulb to burn out. There is no fancy software to worry about. There is also no complicated hardware to connect. Where can you find out about using flip charts effectively?

Saturday, June 21, 2008

In a previous post on June 4, 2008 I discussed “Learning Hand Gestures from YouTube Videos”. I did not remember then where that idea came from. It probably actually came from an article by Carmine Gallo titled “YouTube your way to better speaking”.

The article originally in appeared in the August 8, 2007 issue of Business Week

It was later reprinted in Toastmaster for October 2007, which is where I read it last fall.

Mr. Gallo points out several great speakers, and even some specific speeches. He mentions two business executives he particularly admires: Steve Jobs of Apple and John Chambers of Cisco.

The title for this post is something one comedian said long ago about another “borrowing” his material. It may have been Fred Allen complaining about Milton Berle. Although you can learn a lot from others, you still need to find your own unique style of speaking.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

DIA is an acronym that now means “Drowning in Acronyms”. DIA originally stood for the Defense Intelligence Agency, but now it just describes their mode of speech. DIA and the rest of our government (and much of industry) talk glibly about UAVs and IEDs, and so on. They know what this alphabet soup of abbreviations means. To them it all is quite obvious.

They forget that we do not understand most of what they are saying. If you absolutely must use an acronym in a speech, then please take a few seconds to define it. As a general rule please AAIP (Avoid Acronyms If Possible). Your audience will thank you.

Some of the most obscure acronyms are drifted names for technical societies. An acronym originally stood for the name. Then the name changed, but the acronym did not. Presumably this is due to the complexities of American trademark law. However, it is just wonderful for confusing outsiders. For example, I am a member of TMS which originally was The Metallurgical Society. Now TMS actually is The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society.

It gets worse. Over in Great Britain there used to be the Institute of Metals, IOM. Now it is IOM3, meaning the Institute of Materials, Minerals, and Mining. The newer alphanumerical soup is worse, and should be avoided even in Business to Business (B2B) communication.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Don McMillanhas a hilarious, four minute comedy video on “Life After Death by PowerPoint”. It shows what you should not do. Most of us unfortunately have been victims of similar PowerPoint presentations. You can watch Don either on MySpaceTVor on YouTube with added subtitles

Sunday, June 15, 2008

In his inaugural speech Franklin Roosevelt famously said that: “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance”. He did NOT say that the only thing we have to fear is significant anomalies.

An anomaly is something abnormal or irregular. “Significant anomalies” is internal NASA technical jargon for major discrepancies that might lead to problems. Would we want to hear about insignificant anomalies? We probably would not. Somewhere inside NASA though somebody is looking to try and catch them before they grow to become significant.

Technical jargon has escaped from inside industry and government and now is being inflicted on the outside world. They know what it means, but the rest of us are scratching our heads. Jargon usually is the enemy of clarity in speaking. Steve Adubato discussed this problem in an article titled Lose the jargon, clarity is the way to go

When people ask me what I do, I tell them that for the last twenty years I have been figuring out why things busted or rusted. In technical jargon I could say that I conducted root cause failure analysis (or RCFA). My part of the puzzle starts from looking at the materials and processes used to make a component, product, or system. When I talk with a client, I often say that: “It was made right. We better look at how it was used to see why it broke (or rusted).” I have learned to resist saying that “Chemical and metallurgical analysis of the component revealed no significant anomalies.”

Quotations can provide ideas for talks or just punch lines. Remember that you usually don't have to reinvent the wheel, just to borrow a hubcap or two. Bartelby.com is a great online source for quotations: http://www.bartleby.com/quotations/

Some quotations are deeply embedded in our language. For example, "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread" comes from the English poet Alexander Pope. Johnny Mercer has used just three words "fools rush in" for the title of a song in 1940. Those words also are the title of a romantic comedy movie from 1997 starring Salma Hayek and Matthew Perry.

What is a podcast? It’s just an audio file you can play on your computer. You also can download it, save it, and listen to it later on. Then you can move it over to a portable MP3 player (iPod, etc.) and listen while you jog or drive.UCLA has an introduction called "What is Podcasting?" that you can either read one chunk at a time or download as a big .pdf file to read later. See http://www.oid.ucla.edu/units/tec/tectutorials/casting/whatispodcasting01

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

In my previous post I referred to Steve Adubato’s web site titled "Stand & Deliver" http://www.stand-deliver.com/home.asp He started his company with that name in 1999. Variations of that phrase have been used as the title for several books about speaking and presentations.In 2006 there was Jocelin Kagin’s, "Stand & Deliver: your guide to dynamic presentations".In 2002 there was Philip Khan-Panni’s "Stand and Deliver: leave them stirred, not shaken" (a sly reference to the fictional secret agent James Bond and his martinis). Of course, "Stand and Deliver" also was the title of a 1988 movie about Jaime Escalante teaching calculus to students in East LA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Deliver

However, if you mention the phrase "stand and deliver" to an audience of Englishmen as being related to public speaking you may expect to be greeted by peals of derisive laughter. That phrase also has a VERY different older meaning related to highway robbery (or "income redistribution"). Stand means to come to a stop, and deliver means to hand over your wallet or purse. The phrase uttered by a highwayman typically was "stand and deliver - your money or your life".

Can you find the meaning for an entire phrase? Sure! Go to a library and look in a dictionary of idioms. The McGraw Hill Dictionary of American Idioms says that "stand and deliver" means "to give up something to someone who demands it (originally used by highway robbers asking for passengers valuables)"

There have been tons of newspaper articles about public speaking. Most are not worth reading. A shining exception is the columns written by Steve Adubato. He has a collection of them back to 2001 posted on his web site: http://www.stand-deliver.com/home.aspOn the top line of the home is a box labeled "Columns" If you mouse over it you can see four entries labeled NJ Biz, The (Newark, New Jersey) Star Ledger, Syndicated Columns, and MSNBC.com Columns.

Last week I was looking on the web for information about humor in public speaking. I found that Andrew’s post listed four blogs on the topic of Speech Humor. He also listed a dozen Toastmaster blogs. More recently Andrew has been discussing the ten speech topics in the basic Toastmasters manual on Competent Communication. So far he has done the first three. Stay tuned to Andrew for the rest of them!

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Where can you get all that good stuff in one place? Not out on the open web! If you put the phrase "public speaking" into Google you will get an ocean of 9 million hits. If you also add filetype:pdf, then you will still get a vast sea of 170,000 Acrobat file hits.You can find the 700 articles on the web site for your friendly local public library, in their magazine databases. They are neatly subject-indexed and even divided into two categories: magazines (560) and academic journals (140).Your lifetime is the limited time for this special offer.Your library card is the key that unlocks them. Most of them at the Boise Public Library are in a database called Gale General OneFile. It was bulk purchased with state tax dollars under a program called Libraries Linking Idaho (acronym LiLI).For example, Carmine Gallo wrote an article in the March 4, 2008 issue of Business Week Online titled "How to inspire people like Obama does". Does that sound interesting? (Gallo also wrote the book 10 Simple Secrets of the World’s Greatest Business Communicators that I mentioned in my last post).Also, Michael Anthony Holliday wrote an article in the September 2007 issue of the Training Journal titled "Friends, Romans, Countrymen…" The article is a 4-page color Acrobat file and includes a complicated concept map to illustrate the topic of using concept maps to organize presentations.

Under Academic Journals Tory DeFoe wrote a very blunt article in the December 21, 2007 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education titled "The truth is, you gave a lousy talk".

Now, if you are lucky you might find a few dozen articles posted on a single web site. Your library has a treasure trove with hundreds of them. They actually index even more: about 1350 articles, but they only have full text for 700. I usually begin by limiting the search to full text. However, I could always go back and see what else I missed. Perhaps the local university library (Boise State University) has some of the others.

There are about 8000 book titles on the subject of public speaking. I recommend that you not buy any of them without first borrowing some from your friendly local public library. (Here in Boise, Idaho we only have a couple hundred books on the subject.) No matter what level you are at, or what problem you wish to solve you probably can find a promising title (if not several). It’s similar to browsing for cookbooks.

There are books for those starting from complete ignorance of the topic like:Laurie Rozakis, Complete Idiot’s Guide to Public Speaking orMalcolm Kushner, Public Speaking for DummiesMany college textbooks also are out there, but I have yet to see the truly honest title, Public Speaking for Naïve College Students

There are many books of small numbers like:Carmine Gallo, 10 Simple Secrets of the World’s Greatest Business Communicators orMark Wiskup, Presentation S.O.S.: From Perspiration to Persuasion in 9 Easy StepsFor marketing reasons there are never titles that admit that the small number of steps or "secrets" truly are neither simple nor easy.

There are many other books of large numbers (or smorgasbords) like:Caryl Rae Krannich, 101 Secrets of Highly Effective Speakers orMandar Marathe, The Successful Speaker: 273 Tips for Powerful PresentationsJust browse through the contents to find your topic of interest.

PowerPoint presentations can include neat tricks, like built-in video. What happens when the video will not run properly on the laptop and projector you bring along? The audience gets the wrong message that technology is complicated and unreliable. Before you head out the door you need to try the presentation out to find and fix any glitches. Six weeks ago I toured the Idaho National Laboratory with a busload of seasoned citizens in a program organized by the Osher Institute in Boise. The morning began in the conference room of the Shilo Inn in Idaho Falls. One of the presentations was about a powerful computer software package called the Robot Intelligence Kernel (or RIK). RIK is an operating system for robots. It gives robots exceptional new levels of autonomy and intelligence. This revolutionizes robot capabilities and the robot/operator relationship. The robots can do cool things all by themselves, like detecting land mines both faster and better than humans can. A simple video-game style interface shows the operator what the robot is doing.

Their video about the Robot Intelligence Kernel would not run at all. Luckily they had brought along a 4-wheeled robot about the size of a lawnmower. Finally they gave up on the PowerPoint and just turned the robot loose. It took off like an inquisitive baby rhino. The robot galloped around the room all by itself, carefully avoiding the tables, the chairs, and their astonished occupants.

If you go to: http://www.inl.gov/adaptiverobotics/robotintelligencekernel/index.shtml you can click on the link in the upper right and see the video they did not show us that day. You can also download and read the fact sheet.During the tour our guides mentioned that the Robot Intelligence Kernel had won an R&D 100 award for 2006. R&D 100 awards are presented by Research & Development magazine for the 100 most technologically significant new products of the year. The Chicago Tribune simply calls them the "Oscars of Inventions". Our guides never said it that clearly.

Can you understand the following description from the web page? How would you simplify it to communicate with a non-technical audience?

"RIK is a portable, reconfigurable suite of perceptual, behavioral and cognitive capabilities that can be used across many different platforms, environments and tasks. RIK integrates algorithms and hardware for perception, world-modeling, adaptive communication, dynamic tasking, and behaviors for navigation, search and detection."

"RIK is comprised of four layers. The foundation is the Generic Robot Architecture that provides an object-oriented framework and an application programming interface to feed data from a host of different platforms, sensors and actuators into a second-layer set of Generic Robot Abstractions. The third layer is comprised of many reactive and deliberative Robot Behaviors that take the generic robot abstractions as input. In turn, the top layer provides the "Cognitive Glue" that orchestrates the asynchronous firings of these behaviors towards specific application tasking. Dynamic autonomy interleaves different modes of human input into the functioning of the RIK behaviors."

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Suppose you wanted to find examples of an excellent speaker using hand gestures. Where would you look? How about on YouTube. Don’t laugh! At least one member of the National Speakers Association has a series of his brief (five minute) videos posted there. Alan Weiss is a well-known consultant. You can find twenty-one of his videos listed on his web site under "The Movies: The Writing on the Wall" at:http://www.contrarianconsulting.com/category/the-movies-the-writing-on-the-wall/Ignore the showoff opening and closing with his fancy red convertible and white German Shepherd. Concentrate on the talk, and look at what he does with his hands.

Monday, June 2, 2008

What should you do with your arms and hands when you speak? Timothy Koegel has some good answers. On page 62 of his book The Exceptional Presenter he says you should NOT let your arms dangle uselessly in front of your body. He calls this the T-Rex posture, and shows a cartoon of that dinosaur in a business suit. Then he lists a whole series of irrelevant hand gestures that can distract and annoy your audience:Four examples are:The "spider on the mirror". Fingertips touching fingertips. Try some spider pushups!

The "sisters of mercy". Hands in the praying position, asking for the presentation to be over.

The "fire starter". Rubbing the hands together in an attempt to ignite the brain.

The "hand washer". Scrub up, and finish this dangerous operation.

Later in the chapter he discusses effective gestures. Now, Tim Koegel certainly knows what to do with his hands. If his name sounds vaguely familiar it is because he was the starting quarterback for the Notre Dame football team after Joe Montana.

About Me

This blog is about public speaking. The author is Richard I. Garber, ACS, a Toastmaster. From July 2008 to June 2010 he was Vice President-Education for Capitol Club Toastmasters in Boise, Idaho. Opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author alone, and are not the official positions of Toastmasters International, etc.
Richard is retired. He has over twenty years of experience as a consultant on failure analysis (figuring out why things busted or rusted) and a Ph.D. in Metallurgical Engineering & Materials Science.
His email is r_i_garber at hotmail.com

DISCLAIMER

We don’t necessarily believe what we write, and neither should you. Information furnished to you is for topical (external) use only. This information actually may not be worth any more than what you paid for it (nothing). The author may not even have been either sane (or sober) when he wrote it down and posted it. Don’t worry, be happy.